


In Silence

by JazzRaft



Series: In Weakness & In Strength [7]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 06:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11914809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: He'd wanted to be so much like Cor. He supposed, in losing as much as he had, he finally was.





	In Silence

There was silence in the air and salt on his lips.

The sea writhed in foamy white anguish against the cliff-side, lashing up against the rocks far, far below. The water was blacker than the inky sky it wrestled with inside its reflection. The seafoam below was more vivid than the stars above. All of the glittering lights overhead had slowly been blotting themselves out since the passing of the Oracle.

Though their friends at Cape Caem had not indicated any alarm over an abrupt escalation of the starlight’s decline, Prompto was certain that the sky had made a sudden shift to a darker shade since they had walked out of Gralea.

Or maybe it was just that his own vision had gone darker since the one thing that had given him light for so many years had gone out.

He was so, _so_ angry! That he hadn’t been fast enough to latch onto the hand clawing desperately from the traitorous glow of the Crystal they’d fought so hard to find. That all of his practice and precision was for nothing if his bullets were useless on the monster that stole Noctis from him. It had been so _satisfying_ to watch that _thing_ pretending to be a man fall. To know, for just an awful, bitter breath of a moment, that _he_ had done that. He had shot down the manifestation of all of their pain. He had avenged Noct. It was _over._

But then, Ardyn stood up and he walked away with all of Prompto’s hopes in the cascade of the shadows that followed his heels.

He felt so… defeated. He knew that he wasn’t the only one. He knew that it wasn’t just him that felt like it was all – and only – his own fault that they had lost Noctis. But no one wanted to share the blame. They didn’t want to hurt each other worse than they’d already been hurt by sharing the burden of their failures. They just wanted to bear it all themselves. Try to make it easier for everyone else.

It was so isolating. So unlike how they used to be.

He’d never heard silence as loudly as he did on the way back to Caem. He’d never heard self-loathing, unsaid, quite as clearly. He saw it in the way Gladio rested his head against his fist on the windowsill, and constantly pressed his knuckles to his eyes, ashamed to look at anything for how he had failed his king. Iggy’s stillness was as unnerving as a corpse, as if a part of him had died when Noctis vanished. A terrible part of Prompto was grateful that Ignis couldn’t see the last, frantic reach of their friend, grasping for hands that he couldn’t see reaching back for him, racing to rescue him.

In the silence, Prompto thought he could hear Noctis screaming. Crying, alone. Thinking he’d been abandoned.

He couldn’t get away from it fast enough when they landed at the lighthouse. He could barely force the words out when Talcott came bounding down the path, expecting heroic tales and souvenirs and a prince to step out of the empty airship to share it all with him. Prompto didn’t know how to console the kid. He didn’t even know how to tell him, even after he already did.

He watched pairs of smart black shoes pass below his eyes where he’d stared down at Talcott’s sneakers. He heard nothing but the quiet in his own head. He didn’t hear the child’s confused questions or Monica’s careful ushering as she helped him away. He didn’t hear Dustin’s dry interrogation of anyone who had the strength to speak.

Nobody did. Aranea told the man as much – and not nearly as kindly. But Prompto didn’t hear that, either.

He didn’t hear the reserved apologies. He didn’t hear the guided march up to the ramshackle cottage in the shadow of the lighthouse. He didn’t hear the whine of the engines as the airship took off on its search for the lost in need of rescue. He didn’t hear Iris leap up from her chair at the kitchen table to bundle into Gladio’s chest. He didn’t hear the slow, deliberate thump of Cor’s boots as he approached Ignis.

But he did hear the way Ignis told him that they failed. Because he told him with no words at all. Cor could hear Noctis screaming in the silence on Iggy’s tongue just as loudly as Prompto could.

The quiet was too loud in the house. As he fled the plaintive noise of it and climbed the hill to the seat behind the lighthouse, a voice that only Noctis could help keep quiet told him that he was a coward for running away. That he was a failure, that he was useless, that he couldn’t save his best friend, not even after Noctis had saved him.

_Maybe if you hadn’t taken so many pictures… Maybe if you hadn’t made so many stupid jokes… Maybe if you had paid attention, taken this seriously, stopped trying to be the friend and be the guardian you were supposed to be…_

The camera was a lens over everything he’d done wrong. He scrolled through the digital prints while he waited for the crash of the tide to drown out the silence in his skull. The warmth he used to feel behind every happy memory made him feel as cold as the soundless night. Every smile, every stumble, every candid scowl that he remembered turning into a sound of laughter made him want to go back in time and tear the camera from his own hands. Tell himself to stop fooling around and focus on the danger that was right in front of him. Stop acting like such a fool and open his eyes to the fact that this wasn’t some romp across the country. That there weren’t costs to their safety and their freedoms. That there wasn’t a duty they all had to uphold for the sake of a better kingdom.

The anger came back over him with the cresting of the waves. All those selfies, stupid and shallow; all those filters, useless and fake and ruining the lighting of every memory… Hatred welled up in the bottom of his throat as he looked at himself, face pressed next to Noct’s, both of them grinning at the lens beneath the rosy glow of an abused filter.

He’d ruined everything.

He’d ruined _Noct_.

He almost threw the camera over the safety railing. Almost pelted it far out to the black waters, almost watched it plummet like the feeling in his stomach as he watched hope slip from his fingertips and darkness march away like it’d won. He almost threw away everything that had mattered to him because he didn’t deserve to have it anymore.

He raised his arm to throw it, but every time he tried to catapult it forward, he couldn’t make it move. The hands of his friends, the men he remembered that seemed to have died somewhere on a train between Altissia and Niflheim, held him back. Invisible grips, holding him hard and refusing to let go and making his chest ache because he hadn’t been able to do that for any of them.

Prompto slowly drew the camera to his chest, curling down around it and pressing it to his heart. It burned with all of the scorn he had for his stupid, smiling self. But with the heat of how much he hated his own failures, came the warmth of what each memory meant to him. Of being accepted for everything that he tried to be, but never was. Of being cared for and cared about and taking care where he could in return. He couldn’t let that go. He couldn’t let go of everything that had ever made him happy. Had ever made him feel _human._

When Cor came, he was even quieter than the silence. The silence was loud and echoed with thoughts that could never be put into words. Cor was utterly soundless. It was oddly comforting now, whereas before it had unnerved Prompto, badly.

The Crownsguard perched on the other end of the bench, dark and stoic as a raven. The collar of his jacket ruffled in the breeze, a turbulence that didn’t appear anywhere else on his motionless face.

He held his sword against his knees, the same as always. But there was something different about it now. It wasn’t the same as the reverent honor with which he rested alongside his blade at the end of every training session. It wasn’t the same as the conserved relaxation, hands curled loosely around the scabbard of his sword, ready, even at rest, to glide out against the threat of danger.

Prompto couldn’t look anyone in the eye since they’d come back to Lucis. But he was finding that feet and hands were saying more than words or eyes ever could. Cor’s hands were white and bloodless, clasped like carved stone around his sword. Gripping it as hard as Prompto held his camera, but hating it the whole time. Like that he wanted nothing more to do with it. Wanted to throw it into the sea, too.

It was hard, seeing that. Cor the Immortal had been an unyielding idol for Prompto since high school. A figure of discipline and sureness and gruff perfection. He was faulted, though no one knew how much. Something in his face had always been familiar to Prompto when he saw him on the news, when he met him in person after applying for Crownsguard training. He couldn’t see the fault-lines, but somehow Prompto knew that they were there. Cracking open just beneath the hard, polished skin.

 _Like Magitek,_ he thought now. _Perfect design; broken application._ Prompto hadn’t known what he was when he idolized Cor. He wondered now if the reflection he’d seen in him during that time was the truth he didn’t want to see all along.

“This is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.” The sea-sounds rumbled like thunder over the dark cloud of Cor’s voice. Prompto heard his mouth open, heard a curt inhale of breath before it clotted in his throat. He couldn’t form the words, _Out-live your King._

“How did you keep going? After… the King…” Prompto didn’t know where he found the strength to ask – he didn’t even know if he could call it “strength.”

He was afraid, but he wasn’t sure of what. It wasn’t the steadily surrendering starlight. He wasn’t afraid of the dark, of the daemons that crept along the roads when it fell. He wasn’t afraid of getting pancaked by an iron giant, or swallowed and smothered to death by a mindflayer, or bled by a horde of goblins in the black forests of Duscae. He wasn’t even afraid of himself anymore.

But he was scared. Of not knowing what to do next.

“I kept going for his son,” Cor answered him. “I vowed that, if I had failed to protect my King, I would protect that which was most precious to him instead. And now that I’ve failed Noctis, too, I have to protect what mattered to him. That’s you, and Ignis, and Gladiolus; everyone down there.” He nodded down the hill, to the tiny lights of the mourning house. “As Crownsguard, we’re willed the treasures of our King. So long as there’s still one left to defend, we can’t give up.”

“Yeah… I remember.”

Cor had taught him that in one of the lessons he oversaw in his training. They had to look out for each other. Like they couldn’t look after Noct. They couldn’t lose each other like they’d lost him.

Prompto had never become a Crownsguard. Not on paper, anyway; not officially. But he was learning what it meant to be one far outside of the big square arena underneath the Citadel. He was learning that he was more of a Crownsguard than he’d thought he ever could be. He’d lost as much as one. He’d lost as much as Cor.

He’d wanted to be so much like Cor. _I guess that I finally am._

He didn’t want to cry, but the corners of his eyes stung, anyway. He didn’t want to lose Noct, but he couldn’t avoid that, either.

Cor didn’t cry. Not where Prompto could see it.

But he could hear it. In that silence.

Cor didn’t tell him not to cry. He didn’t tell him that it would be alright. Prompto wanted to tough it out, to be so strong that he didn’t have to cry. But he wasn’t quite there yet. After this, he told himself. After these last tears, he would be strong enough not to cry anymore.

Cor’s hand on the back of his neck, where his spine coiled up into his shoulders, wordlessly told him that he would help him through it. That none of them were alone in this. That they were stronger if they shouldered all of this together.

The lights in the sky fought a little harder through the black haze. They looked just a little bit brighter when the tears went away.


End file.
